About

What is MakingBetter?

MakingBetter™ is a partnership between Megan Bowe and Aaron Silvers, who continue to lead revolutionary changes in technology, strategy and design practice around learning, education and organizational development. With our combined experience, MakingBetter connects how people naturally work to the outcomes sought by organizational leaders, particularly in change and growth efforts.

Chief among our values with MakingBetter is walking the talk: we choose our projects based on the people and causes we want to support, ultimately helping every person impacted to grow as both a neighbor and a citizen within every community to which a person belongs. In this way, MakingBetter is different because every effort it champions is one that is intrinsically motivating to us. We model this, we consult to this and the idea spreads. Consider the meteoric rise of “Tin Can” within the learning industry, and the impacts on different industries voiced by members of “Up to All of Us,” we’re passionate and focused on sustainable changes that add growing value to individuals, organizations and industries.

With MakingBetter, we’re interested in bucking the status quo and seek the really difficult and intractable challenges in organizations looking to make a positive difference in the lives of employees and customers alike. Reach out and connect with us about what we could be doing together to help you make things better.

What Do We Do?

Outside of our advocacy, we consult through challenges and towards outcomes where we can make a measurable impact. The list of things we can help you with includes:

Who are we?

Megan

Megan Bowe is a learning technology product manager, turned standards evangelist and data strategist. She loves digging into the details of strategy, planning, development, and rollout of products. She’s worked with learning technology companies, major publishers, and large organizations to create plans that uniquely meet user needs and use data-driven feedback loops to iterate smarter and faster. Megan works on projects bringing learning, portability of data, and analytics together. Megan has worked with Knewton, designing API integration strategies. She co-created Up to All of Us, a community with an annual gathering that focuses on advancing the intersections between learning, design and technology. Through Connections Forum, Megan also puts on xAPI camp events across North America.

Megan helped launch the Experience API at Rustici Software. On top of evangelism of the open source specification effort, Megan worked hand-in-hand with innovators and early adopters of the emerging technology at the implementation level. Megan conceived and produced wireframes and early prototypes and taught the first engineers and instructional technologists to experiment with the API how to make statements. In every way, Megan invented much of what the emerging community of practice advocates around this learning technology.

She continues to advocate for and support implementation of the specification as a Partner in MakingBetter, a consultancy focused on creating resilient organizations. MakingBetter connects bigger goals with the curiosity, empathy and self-reliance of the people who work within an organization. Megan’s focus on content strategy to support adaptive, targeted on-the-job performance improvement has her increasingly in-demand as a design strategist. Megan is also a community liaison for the Learning Locker, an open source, enterprise-ready learning record store making use of the Experience API and is designing their query capabilities — the first open source effort to make simple analytics accessible with the latest in learning technologies.

Aaron

Aaron Silvers is a former K-8 Librarian, turned Information Architect who designed, managed and led development with two major eLearning specifications and standards: SCORM® and the Experience API™. He’s designed and produced learning experiences with a variety of technologies for organizations large and small, in both the private and public sectors (including K-8), for over 15 years with an M.S. in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Wisconsin.

Aaron’s passion is the learning, performance and collaboration that comes from information and knowledge exchange with specific interests in community building, social media, tech standards and implementations and the Internet. He has a knack for tackling wicked problems and delivering on big, innovative ideas.

Aaron helms multiple communities-of-practice focused on design, technology and/or learning including one of the most successful Open Government efforts to-date. As a Partner in MakingBetter and the Chair of the IEEE xAPI Study Group, he leads the standardization effort for the Experience API as well as a community liaison for the Learning Locker, an open source, enterprise-ready learning record store making use of the Experience API, focusing on building partnerships with other open source efforts, standards and specification organizations.